After You Read These Words, Give Them Back

“What would you do if someone broke into your home?” I ask A.

It is a question a man asked me once, and I know A’s answer before he speaks it.

“I’d shoot him. No question.”

A. keeps death mounted on his walls. Three heads. Four black eyes staring. I stand before him naked and shy, with goosebumps rising from my skin. “Did you kill each one?” He nods and points to the eyeless skull, his own creation. He wants to touch me and I want to touch him, but my words come between us. I ask him how a head becomes a skull.

“You boil it.”

I imagine my skull in a pot. The scent of my flesh rising. My skin separates from bone. Bubbles escape from the hollows of my eyes. My lower jaw falls to the bottom of the pot. I boil down to nothing but a skull ready to be mounted.

When I die, I want my body burned. If I can’t have me, no one can. Let me be dust, the remains of all that existed. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Head to skull to nothing.

I meet J. when I am sixteen. His skin unscathed and my hair tucked behind my ears because I read in a magazine that boys like that. They like that, and ice cube blowjobs, and matching underwear sets, and girls fifty pounds lighter than me. I spend nights in his backyard, escaping fluorescent lighting for a darkness lit only by cigarette tips and cell phone screens.

Every night, J. places a new girl on speaker phone and tells her he loves her.

“I love you, too,” they always say.

It is a spectacle. A point of prowess to show off in front of his friends that he can have any girl he wants. But there is something sincere about his performance, surpassing his innumerable dishonesties. In his own way, I imagine, he does love these girls. Maybe in the way God loves his people, detached and far away.

“What would you do if someone broke into your home?” I ask J, years later.

I wonder: for a man, is home invasion the most intrusive crime imaginable?

“Why do you think I have a safe full of guns?”

The moles on our forearms match. The mark of soulmates, I tell E. In a past life, our souls touched and pressed a mark on our skin.

“So, we’d recognize each other in this life,” I say.

He kisses me.

Then I feel it: a stirring inside me I can’t quite quell. At the core of my being, I want to be seen. It happened once, I think. When the galaxies inside me were discovered. The expanse of my mind and soul were comprehended. For a moment, all I had lost was returned to me.

I crave the end of loss in a Starbucks parking lot. I am sitting in my car with E., a stranger who twirls the Ace of Hearts between his fingers and wears a mask dangling from one ear with the words: 100% human.

In the darkness of the night, we speak nothing but each other’s names. I say his. He says mine. Until we’re filled to bursting.

In the light of day, S. writes my name in paint on someone else’s walls. I imagine myself in a room I have never seen beneath someone else’s picture frames and kindergarten art. My name, invisibly there beneath coats of white, will remain until the building is demolished.

Without S. ever knowing, I scratch his name into my skin. Beneath bathwater, I carve into my flesh like a tree trunk. Red and swelling to the surface, his name is visible for only my eyes to see. My body will remember his name like it remembers every bruise I have bloomed.

I am convinced every hurt I have healed will resurface. My skin will be stained purple with skinned knees, love bites, and miscalculated steps. And his name, red and blistering, will be bold and visible on my stomach, along with all the hurts this body has harbored.

We exchange death wishes. A. pictures himself on his slanted driveway with his shotgun in his mouth. The blood rushes downward, he explains, his insides emptying into the nearest gutter. Washing away like rain.

I want to jump in front of a train. Like Anna Karenina, I say. When I was in high school, teenage jumpers littered the train tracks like cigarette butts.

“Or I want to drive straight into a wall,” I say. “I like the idea of dying in the front seat of my car.”

My fingertips outline the traces of ink on J’s torso while he thrusts inside of me. Four. The names of four women etched on his skin. Because there is history between us, I know that beneath the infinity symbols, daggers, and American flags are invisible traces of two others whose permanence has been scratched out. Six names in all.

As he reaches closer to a climax, my body defies any attempts at rising action. Even during sex, my will keeps me rooted to a reality I insist upon. I am a mountain. No man will move me into submission. No man will take my name into his skin. No man will carve into me. I am no Mount Rushmore. I am a monument to me.

In the backseat of my car, my words enter a new realm, where seemingly only I can hear them.

No. No. No. No.

I recite it like a mantra, gaining volume until I’m shouting, but still, E. continues. I meet my gaze in the reflection of the window. I wish I were Medusa. I beg my reflection to turn me to stone. Make me impenetrable. I am a monster. Please. Turn me to stone.

What would I do if someone broke into my home? I would tell him it’s okay. I’d comfort him as he pretends he didn’t know he was breaking in. I would place a finger on the crease in his temple and tell him not to worry. It’s okay. I’m okay. I would soothe him like a child.

And, I, I would wish I never had a home to break into.

S. tells me about his mother dying in the backseat of a car. He pushed and pushed against her heart, willing it to beat. His dad, driving, ignored traffic signs, skidding on ice, racing for a miracle. S. held his mother’s frame in the back, exhaling his breath into her lungs.

Take my air, take my rhythm, live through me. Awaken. You are not stone. You are human. Live.

Her eyes opened for the last time as they pulled into the back of a hospital.

In the morning, waiting on a school bus, he saw his breath make icy clouds as he told his friend, “Hey, my mom died last night.”

He tells me this as we lie in bed, and I whisper to him what I have said before.

“I wish I had done everything on earth with you.”

I wish I was in the backseat of his car with him that night, my palm to her ribs, watching life start over once again.

“You’re broken,” says A., “but I like you.”

I want to tell him he misunderstands. I am not broken. I am fragmented but whole. I am like the Giving Tree. Every chipped piece of myself I have gifted to someone else. If I want, I can take those gifts back. I can unsaw my branches, regrow my apples and build up my trunk. I am not broken as long as I’m rooted to this life.

I often wonder if I have lived this life before. I imagine I have dwelled in many bodies with moles and freckles that match my own. I have lived this exact life, and I have written these same words. I have created innumerable realities. Give me your worst, for my soul exists in eternal recurrence, balanced between infinity and nothingness. I excel in perpetuity.

As if in a cave, I play with shadows on S’s wall. I mime secrets with hand puppets and watch my darkness tell stories only for him.

As if in a cave, I expect to hear an echo when I say aloud what happened in the backseat of my car.

As if in a cave, silence sticks as S. returns to his shadow play.

With S., I imagine myself as the great creator of our love. It existed within me as an entity so large it would engulf our universe in physical form. I once said that love is touching souls, but now I believe something greater: that within me, I contain a love so boundless it can champion anything. Alone, I subsist with unimaginable capacity.

Still I wonder, when Wendy left Neverland, did she leave Peter her shadow to play with?

I think about the women tattooed on J’s body. I wonder if they ever want their names back. I would if I had ever attained permeance. Give me back what is mine. Take the ink from out your skin and put it in my hand. Stain me with my own name.

I want my name back from everyone who has spoken it. Give me back my words. My confessions and complaints. Give me back all I have said. I take back everything.

Shannon Elward is a writer and editor from Palo Alto, California. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her works have appeared in Waxing and Waning, The Huffington Post, and the Sarah Lawrence Review. She is the acting Fiction/Nonfiction Editor of Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine.